Avocado Trauma

You Ate What? 20 comments

avocado cookbook cover

The Avocado Cookbook
Bauer and Logerman
1967

I can’t decide if the pictures in black and white are a good thing or a bad thing. Especially after seeing the color photos. I am a big fan of avocados! I like them cut up plain and will add them to sandwiches, salads, etc. Take a look at these recipes. The guacamole recipe given sounds awful. I guess they were looking for a no texture type of “dip.” The other stuff is okay, but the photos make it look worse than it probably is. Also, when was guacamole pronounced with silent g?

I am also going to have to give a thumbs down to the Dipsy Doodle Dip. Step away from the mayo and cream cheese people!

Mary

appetizers fruit cocktail salads seafood egg stuffed avocados avocado ice cream

 

20 comments

      1. Martha,

        Thanks for the link! I’ve bookmarked the site. It’s got some horrors and some actually great looking recipes. šŸ™‚

  4. Avocados are almost like some kind of alien plant to me. I don’t get why they’re so popular. Maybe it’s an American thing?

    1. Except they’re also wildly popular in Japan, Australia, Britain, China, South Africa…

      And, naturally, par for the course in Mexico and Central America.

  5. You asked, “Also, when was guacamole pronounced with silent g?”

    Um …. for many native Spanish speakers, there is a silent G. Here in Texas, most folks do not pronounce the G. We would also never dream of putting cream cheese into guac.

  6. This was really ahead of its time, but that time was over 50 years ago and so… bye-bye.

    I had avocado toast for breakfast today, even though I am not a millennial.

    Mary: it’s more of a “(tiny bit of h)wa” sound, actually. It’s to do with dipthongs and such in Spanish. Thus “hwac” en (Mexican) EspaƱol, and “guac” in English.

    Under any pronunciation, it does NOT have sour cream. Or that little amount of chili. And it ought to be lime juice.

    Signed,
    Person who has spent their entire life in parts of Nuevo EspaƱa that ended up full of Yanquis

  7. Even in 1967, my family did not eat canned green beans. There was no need, Clarence Birdseye having perfected his freezing technique some decades earlier. Why on earth would they use them in the “Patio Salad?” Which would still be awful even if no canned products were used. Yuck.

    This seems like a book targeted to someone with no experience with avocados and no imagination. But the imagination of the authors is perverted. I wonder whether people who were victimized by these recipes ever ate an avocado again?

  8. I’m not much of a cook but I’d hope modern-day cookbooks are not this labour intensive. The avocados would be brown by the time I got through making Avocado Italia. Some of these recipes seem to be just for filling the page count. I assumed this was a thin book until I saw the horrifying reference to a “page 204”. Purge.

  9. guacamole on corn on the cob? Chicken livers superba? “nippy sauce”? Disgusting!! Let me poll the avocado coworker on this when she’s in next.

  13. I absolutely despise avocados and this book isn’t making me like those snot textured things any more.

    BTW, I highly suggest looking up the Avocado Mafia.

  14. Re the Spanish pronunciation of G, in the 1930s I suspect there was a preference to pronounce the G in ā€œLos Angelesā€ in the Spanish way, but Anglophones ended up saying it with a hard G, i.e. ā€œLos Angle-lesā€. (Angelenos, please tell me if my guess is right, Iā€™m a lifelong Minnesotan, and my mom who briefly lived in the LA ā€˜burbs is no longer alive for me to ask )

  15. The g is guacamole does sound like an w in Spanish, hence the Mexican slang “gĆ¼ey” is often written “wey”.

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